Some folks are never
satisfied. Ranchers who use public lands for their cattle long have lambasted
environmental groups for using the courts to stop, or at least stall, environmental
degradation from those uses. Yet, when environmental activists play by the ranching
industry's own rules, the ranchers still cry foul.

That appears to be the situation in the Grand Staircase-Escalante
National Monument, where the Grand Canyon Trust has purchased 5 percent of the
grazing permits available in the 1.9 million-acre monument from ranchers at
a cost of $1.5 million. The trust does not intend to run cattle on the land.
Instead, it has asked the federal Bureau of Land Management to retire the permits,
thus reducing or eliminating cattle on those acres.

The Kanab-based Canyon Country Ranchers Association, a
group of 80 ranchers who were not involved in the transactions, has protested
the sales. The association claims there is a conspiracy between the trust and
the BLM to end cattle ranching on monument land.

There is no conspiracy. The trust has simply asked the
BLM to do what the Taylor Grazing Act requires whenever a rancher gives up his
permit: Review the lands to determine if they are "chiefly valuable"
for cattle grazing. The trust bought the permits in areas it determined were
not suitable for cows. The BLM has agreed with those assessments and supports
retiring the permits.

As the ranchers must surely know, this is not some grand
scheme to bilk them out of public grazing allotments. Yet, the association claims
the trust and the BLM have set a bad precedent that will enable environmental
groups to "start buying out ranchers." Regrettably, the only thing
conspiring against the ranchers is southern Utah's arid climate. The monument
gets very little water in normal years, and that is why ranching in southern
Utah -- even with federal assistance -- has always been a mostly marginal enterprise.

The ranchers who sold their leases to the trust left willingly
because they understand that grazing cattle in the desert, particularly in this
fourth year of a relentless drought, costs more than it is worth and also inflicts
damage on the land that may be irreversible.

Crying conspiracy does not reflect well on the members
of the Canyon Country Ranchers Association, who seem not to be able to stand
it that a savvy environmental group played by the same rules governing federal
grazing leases and simply chose not to use the permits to run cattle on the
land.